Keen as Beans and Full of Stupid Ideas

Being a jaded game developer, it is now very easy to spot the keen-as-beans, eager young jump-starts who have just got into the games industry. This is easy because I am not one. We have one at the office now. He has all these great ideas on how to make the game better, and what's worse is that he is convinced they are great ideas.

"What would be cool is if you slowed down when you pressed that button. That would be great."

"That's the attack button. How are you going to attack the bad guy if you keep slowing down?"

"That's the fun bit. You have to catch up again."

"And then press the attack button- aghh, I can't hit him because I'm slowing down... again."

"YEAH!"

Boot to the head.*

These guys are usually new entrants to the games industry proper. They may have come from some other segment sitting on the fringe of the industry, such as a teaching role at some institute, or a wannabe games reviewer who started a game review website for the sole purpose of getting a press entry to E3.

In terms of mathematical sets, if you subtract the set of the people who should never be allowed to suggest any ideas from the set of people with big design ideas, you end up with an almost empty set. Which, coincidentally, is equal to the amount of common sense that a lot of these same people have.

* May not have actually happened. But I did think it.